A Prairie Home Companion

One of the delights of the old BBC 7 - now Radio 4 Xtra - was The Garrison Keillor Radio Show, the international broadcast name for Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media's long-running (39 years and counting) radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion. For those of you not familiar with the format, it's like The Muppet Show, if the Muppets were humans, on the radio, mildly sedated and really into country and American folk music. Garrison Keillor presents the show with the kind of warm milk delivery that lulls you into a sense of absolute comfort, and musical acts are interspersed with comedy skits and spoof advertisements for Powdermilk biscuits or the Professional Organisation of English Majors.

And then they made a movie of it.

To say that my mind was boggled would not be far from the truth. How, I wondered, could this be done?

Given the movie's limited release in the UK, it took me a while to find out. It was, in the end, the final movie directed by Robert Altman (The Player, Pret a Porter), and with an all-star cast portraying characters created by Keillor and the radio show's rep company (most of whom have cameo roles) it is a typically Altman ensemble piece, depicting the last broadcast of a fictionalised version of A Prairie Home Companion.

The action is limited to the stage and dressing rooms of the Fitzgerald Theatre (aside from a couple of scenes in Mickey's Diner). Kevin Kline narrates as Guy Noir, ex-Private Eye-turned-security guard, and the stories of the various characters - Keillor as himself, Woody Harrelson and C. Thomas Howell as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep and Lindsey Lohan as members of a singing family - are threaded through by Asphodel (Virginia Madsen), an angel in a white trenchcoat come to escort someone to God. The camera moves from the stage to the backstage, from performance to 'reality', as the cast of the radio show face their impending cancellation with varying degrees of resignation and denial.

That's really all there is to it.

In a lot of ways, it's like the radio show. It isn't exactly daring, but it's not as bland and safe as it initially seems. There is not much plot and its humour is distinctly odd, but it knows it. At one stage, Asphodel actually discusses with Keillor a joke he once told (two penguins are standing on an ice floe. One turns to the other and says: "You look like you're wearing a tuxedo." The second penguin says: "How do you know I'm not?") and why it is, or isn't, funny ("It's funny because people laugh.") It is packed with great performers giving good performances, and if not exactly Altman's greatest work, it has much to recommend it if you're a fan of that sort of gentle, rambling experience.